digital customer service

If you’re looking for a way to truly understand how your customers are feeling about their experience with your brand, it could be time to consider adding a customer satisfaction survey to your marketing mix. Be warned, however, that not all customer satisfaction surveys are alike. Unless you’re familiar with surveys – the audience, the timing, the purpose – it’s easy to use the terms Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) interchangeably, and it’s quite possible that you’ve never engaged with a Customer Effort Score (CES) survey. […]

You’ve put together a solid review strategy to improve local SEO and build your online reputation, and now you’re seeing a few subpar reviews come in – don’t panic. A few negative reviews are inevitable. According to research from TrustPilot, venting frustrations is among the top motivations for writing online reviews. People want to share a notably good or bad experience to feel empowered or help others make a better buying decision. Instead of feeling disappointment or frustration when a negative review comes in, try to see value in […]

On a scale of 1 to 5, how do your customers feel about your business? That question is getting asked and answered about your business every day online. If you are not actively tuned in to this dialog, you are both putting your business at risk and missing a great opportunity to elevate your brand. The Importance of User Reviews Online review sites started gaining traction around 2012 and since then, their growth has become exponential. Unlike a Net Promoter Score survey that you might hire an outside […]

Once upon a time, community banks and credit unions cornered the market on personalized communications and a neighbor-to-neighbor experience for their customers. But now, with the help of marketing automation platforms, big banks are poised to take back the customer experience. If community banks and credit unions hope to challenge those big banks, they’ll need a strong content strategy and an engine to deliver useful content to their customers. A great place to start is by building a user generated content guide for community banks or for your credit union. […]

It’s never too early to start forecasting what’s going to be ‘the next big thing’ in the digital marketing and tech landscape in 2017. emfluence has compiled trends and expectations from across our agency team members to bring you an array of predictions for what to look for, and more importantly plan for in 2017. The boldest prediction of all? 60% of the time our predictions are right, every time.

There are many moving parts to an SEO campaign and having a roadmap that lists the items to accomplish and the actions we will take to fix & optimize your site, can be the best tool. A solid roadmap can consist of:

We sought to improve our digital agency’s proposals through testing various tools outside of the traditional Word, PowerPoint, and InDesign documents. I average seven proposals per month and with my growing team, I assist in more than I can keep up with. I needed a way to create documents for sales templates that were easy for my team to access, with easy design capabilities to save time and a way for us to track the results more effectively. One of the tools I came across in an article was Qwilr. We decided to give it a test run.

A coworker came across an excellent article by Ben Nadel called The User Experience of Pagination [http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2951-the-user-experience-ux-of-pagination.htm] that got us wanting to dive deeper into the subject of pagination and really take a practical look at determining how you present data.

Customer acquisition is only a small piece of your audience’s marketing journey. Oftentimes, marketing efforts are successful in bringing customers onto a website, but your website isn’t grabbing the baton when it’s time to finish the race. This is where an oftentimes overlooked piece of digital marketing comes in, conversion optimization. Many people know the phrase, but believe this part of strategy can only be accessed by user experience pros. It’s time we take the veil off of conversion optimization. Here are 5 useful tips to use during your website […]

Over the last year, I’ve attended a few banking conferences and a hot topic that’s often brought up is the future of the bank branch. In a recent survey performed by Javelin Strategy and Research, 23% of consumers said they prefer to bank online over the in-branch experience. 40% of millennials would consider banking without a branch, according to Accenture. While banks have responded to the growing demand for online banking preferences, such as mobile deposit, the big question is what is to become of branch banking? Source: Accenture Last […]

Buzzsumo, a content research platform, recently released a new feature in their arsenal of content measurement called SumoRank. This new addition aims to fill a gap in content research by allowing you to search your own company Facebook page. Previously, you had to combine a list of data from various sources (Buzzsumo included) to get a holistic idea of what your content strategy should be for a specific client or company. I still believe that gathering your data from multiple sources is necessary (although challenging, see blog about Digital Dashboards […]

Are you an all day every day user of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) management console? Do you represent a number of clients, each with their own AWS assets and separate AWS accounts? Do you find yourself managing dozens of AWS account credentials and juggling logins just to make small changes throughout your day? Are you tired of jumping through hoops before you can even start your work? If you’re a developer at a digital marketing agency, (and like many developers these days, your cloud provider of choice is Amazon,) […]

You got your customer to your site, helped them find what they were looking for, and now they’re ready to order. Nice work! While it may seem like you’ve accomplished your mission, the reality is that an average of 68% of shopping carts are left abandoned. (http://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate). That means for every three people that come to your site and add items to their cart, only one is buying! Those other two may have decided against buying, or found a better deal elsewhere. But what if the problem could be the […]

In this age of data, endless supplies of information can be accessed with just a click of a button. But most of us have no idea what to do with all of the information available. One area confusing marketers is how to grab actionable insights from our site data. Whether you are a Google Analytics pro or novice, we all know that surfing through analytics can be difficult. Let’s do a quick test of our Google Analytics prowess: Are you using Google Tag Manager or event tracking? Have you setup […]

An interesting email arrived the other day that has caused me to rethink how I document the work we do for clients. From: emfluence Accounting To: Me Just received this from [our client’s controller]. We will need to make changes to the invoice descriptions… Ok, sometimes clients want more details. Normally, the project and ticket names are enough, but there are some clients who want more. No problem – let’s check who it is, and what kind of details they are after. From: Client’s Controller To: emfluence Accounting Thank you […]

In a fantastic SXSWi panel on the growing area of social customer service, the people behind the social media voices of Southwest Airlines, Chase Financial and Samsung spoke to a packed room about how the big guys handle (and learn from!) social media. My 3 favorite quotes:

In a 2012 study, customers cited “impersonal communications” and “lack of services” as one of the top reasons they tried another bank. Using automated profile-based communications — or Profile Pathways — can build better banking relationships.

Helzberg Diamonds offered a deal last week that seemed too good to be true… and turned out it was. Their online system had a glitch and their advertised “surprise savings” were a surprise even to them! These are the moments that define a company’s reputation. There are a lot of lessons to be taken from how Helzberg handled the potential catastrophe.